


The Lecture

by MercuryGray



Series: Hospital Sketches - Alcott/Mercy Street Crossovers [1]
Category: Little Women (2019), Little Women Series - Louisa May Alcott, Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Gen, Role Models, Women Being Awesome, Women helping Women
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-20 05:00:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22943593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: It's hard work, finding good role-models for headstrong daughters.  Before she departs for Mrs. Kirke's boarding house, Mr. March invites his daughter to attend a lecture with him, hoping Jo will find some inspiration from the speaker.
Relationships: Jedediah "Jed" Foster/Mary Phinney
Series: Hospital Sketches - Alcott/Mercy Street Crossovers [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1668142
Comments: 8
Kudos: 16





	The Lecture

She had not intended to like it.

It had been her father's idea to attend the lecture, and he'd sold it to her in the most devious, side-handed way, as though by going she'd be doing him a favor, an old friend would be speaking and it would doubtless be very boring but her mother wouldn't like to be away from home so long, not with the weather that was coming.

And then when the speaker took the stage - well. 

She had simply assumed from all the posters and her father's preface that ‘M. Foster’ was going to be a man. 

And when she spoke! Jo had grown up with Marmee's teaching close to heart that girls could do whatever boys could, but she'd never seen and heard a woman  _ orate _ \- and in such a style! Why had no one told Meg of this? Why had no one told  _ her _ ? The topic had clearly been close to Mrs. Foster's heart, an hour-long speech on the universal rights of man, with subtle but sage hints that women ought to be included in this fold if humankind wanted anything that looked like progress. And people - men! had listened! 

It was a testament to Mrs. Foster's even style that the lecture had not been interrupted, as events of this vein often are, by the presence of a rowdy troublemaker and the assault of the stage with several volleys of rubbish. Indeed, the whole thing was so perfect in its delivery that when the house lights came back up and the applause was ended, Jo felt as though she were coming out of a dream, something so revelatory that it could not possibly have been real - until, of course, she looked at her father and found him smiling from ear to ear at her transcendent joy, and cuffed him on the arm for his insolence. "You fibbed," she accused, still buoyant from the lecture but now feeling dreadfully put-upon, the consequence of being seen by someone who knows you better than you sometimes know yourself. "You said it was by an acquaintance."

"And so she is," Mr. March said with a smile. (He had known all the while, as fathers often do, that his girl would derive the keenest joy from such an outing, and had chosen, as fathers also often do, to keep it under his hat to the eventual chagrin of his child, and his personal entertainment.) "Her husband was a physician at the hospital where I convalesced. He teaches, now, in Boston - a man of some repute at Harvard, I’m given to understand. When he had a minute spare during my stay we'd talk about philosophy. I know him better than her, though - he wasn't married then."

Jo had never asked her father about his hospital stay in Alexandria, and Mr. March did not speak often of it, either, much concerned that people should mistake his participation in the war as a sign that he was in support of all martial endeavors. "The hospital work she spoke of..."

"She had left, for ill health, before I was ever at the hospital, but her absence was felt keenly. People there still spoke well of her - Doctor Foster most of all. When your mother came, he said later she reminded him of someone. Seeing her speak... one could notice a... resemblance." But her father did not elaborate on this further, his eye drawn to a figure emerging from the dress circle boxes, carrying what looked to be a very uncomfortable parcel. "Doctor Foster!"

The bearded figure met his eye with a smile, moving between the thinning crowd until his burden could be recognized - a child of one or two, heavy on his hip. "Mr. March! I'd shake your hand, but as you see I'm...otherwise occupied. Can you not say hello, Elias?" 

Jo watched, more than a little astounded, at this distinguished professor who was holding his infant son as naturally as breathing - a sure sign that this was not a stage act but something he did every day. (She'd known fathers who did such things, hers among them, but it was not, she thought, a thing generally practiced among the middle classes, the remote paterfamilias being a model to which more men aspired, leaving their children to the exclusive preserve of their wives.) Doctor Foster, however, did not seem to see anything strange in this arrangement, and allowed Mr. March to play at peekaboo for a little while until Elias tired of the spectacle and retreated to the refuge of his father's collar, and the adults could return to the regular buisness of introductions. "And you've brought someone along too, I see," the professor said with a smile. 

"Doctor Foster, this is my second-eldest daughter, Jo."

"Ah, the writer!" Foster's tone was merry and conspiratorial. "You have the look of undiscovered genius." She blushed at that, but sensed, somehow, that he meant no harm by it. "And did you enjoy the lecture, Miss March?" He asked, his question now genuine.

"It was ...spectacular," she said, trying (and failing, a little) to keep her enthusiasm to the levels in which humans usually run. 

Foster smiled at that. "Mary will be glad to hear it - she does worry sometimes that she won't be. She'll be down directly, if you'd like to stay and meet her."

Jo glanced, quickly, at her father, begging permission with her eyes to meet the august creature, a request to which he merely smiled and shrugged that they were already here. Finally the lady appeared, dressed for the chilly autumn night outside, her mind a little occupied by the act of pulling on her gloves as she came through the door. “Sorry I’m late, Jed, Mr. Peabody was just telling me about the ticket numbers, and he will go on so.” She pecked him on the cheek, looked up from her gloves and realized that she, fresh from the stage, still had an audience. 

His wife’s brief surprise seemed only to entertain her husband. (Jo was forming an opinion that Doctor Foster was the type who liked a joke.) "Mary, this is Mr. March, whom I've told you about - and his daughter, Jo. Who proclaimed you were spectacular.”

Mrs. Foster smiled and gave one of those modest little shrugs that tries to fob off deserved praise, shaking first Mr March’s hand and then Jo's, her grip decided. (Jo aspired to such firm handshakes and resolved, on the spot, to do better.) "I'm sure I wasn't, but you're kind to say so." 

“Miss March is a writer, too, my dear,” Foster offered, and his wife smiled at the recognition of a kindred spirit.

“Just stories,” Jo said, suddenly feeling very small beside this stately woman with her speeches on topics that actually meant something in the world. “Nothing...serious.”

“Not everything must be serious,” Mrs Foster said encouragingly. “I wrote a series of articles after the war on my nursing, and they weren’t at all straight-faced - and they sold well for it. People like to laugh, and they need it. So don’t diminish yourself,” she added, reaching out to clasp Jo’s hand in solidarity. “We women of letters must stick together.”

Her father stood talking with the Fosters for a few minutes, exchanging pleasantries and recommendations for books and dates when one or the other might come to dinner, until Elias grew too heavy on his father’s shoulder and it was decided that bedtime could be postponed no longer.

During all of this Jo was, for once in her life, nearly speechless, all the grand thoughts and eloquent responses that had bubbled up in her during the course of the lecture suddenly forgotten. For years she’d thought that it must be one or the other, private life or public practice, and here was this woman who had - miraculously - both.

She said little on the carriage ride home, meditating on possibility - that one could be a woman of letters and of domestic concerns, that one did not have to give up one’s dreams when one married - and that there were men in the world who would not wish it of you, who would stoop to holding children and holding lecture notes and accept kisses while one was putting on one’s gloves, who were affectionate and kind, who could be the partner of one’s great endeavors, and not, as she had always supposed, their hindrance.

**Author's Note:**

> After reading Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches recently, I knew there had to be a way to bring the world of Little Women and the world Mercy Street into a common orbit. Obviously Mr. March's hospital stay was a great place to start, but I wanted to open a window for Jo towards seeing a different vision of what marriage for her could look like, separate and different from the marriage her sister Meg has. And of course, who better to model a marriage of intellectual equals than Mary Phinney and Jed Foster? 
> 
> (Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that the Hospital Sketches do make a brief appearance themselves here, though they are very out of character for Mary to have authored, being extremely silly in tone. But we all need some silliness once in a while, right?)


End file.
